Box goes international

Box went to London this week, and at Le Web, announced it was opening a new London office. For now, at least though there are no plans to open a data center in the European Union.

Box will be opening a new office in London staffed with folks who can service European customers in their native languages. For starters, they will offer sales and technical support in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck, general manager for Enterprise at Box, told me last week at info360 that the company hopes to have more than 100 people in place in London by next year.

Box veteran Greg Strickland will lead the European operation with the new title of general manager and VP of global operations. According to a statement he will oversee future expansion in Europe.

Bouck said 40 percent of the Box user base is outside the United States today. They were already translating into 28 languages, but this will be a much more focused effort at making sure there is more direct support on the ground in these native languages.

Bouck indicated that, for now, there are no plans to open a data center in the EU. Although she acknowledged the EU privacy concerns around cloud computing, she said Box intended to use the same approach as Salesforce.com, which has a presence in Europe, but doesn't have an EU data center at this point either. But she said if customers demanded it, they would certainly revisit the idea of local data center presence.

Bouck said that Box was also announcing a new partnership with HP in Europe where HP will offering Box on many SMB devices out of the box (so to speak).

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